Tracking disturbances in transmission networks

Abstract We study the nonlinear inverse source problem of detecting, localizing and identifying unknown accidental disturbances on forced and damped transmission networks. A first result is that strategic observation sets are enough to guarantee detection of disturbances. To localize and identify them, we additionally need the observation set to be absorbent. If this set is dominantly absorbent, then detection, localization and identification can be done in ‘quasi real-time’. We illustrate these results with numerical experiments.